Sharon Stone solidified her standing as a gay camp icon with her drag-worthy performance in Basic Instinct 2 (Sony), a historic flop whose notoriety elevated Stone from deluded has-been to crazy/scary walking punchline. Paul Verhoeven's luxuriously trashy original raised the erotic thriller to pop art, but Michael Caton-Jones' laughable follow-up drags the disreputable subgenre back down to the gutter. Stone's boobs still look great, though, and on unrated DVDs, that's pretty much all that matters anyway…
English majors everywhere gave a collective scoff when they heard Michael Winterbottom would be adapting Lawrence Sterne's 18th-century shaggy-dog tale The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman into a film. But sure enough, Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story (HBO) does the trick. It takes apart the filmmaking process while making the film, flashes back when it promises to move forward, and mixes highbrow concepts with lowbrow humor. Sterne would have loved it…
The best reality show on television, Project Runway (Weinstein) somehow improved in its second season, which had more gifted designers, better week-to-week challenges, and a delicious love-to-hate character in Santino Rice, whose villainy was complicated by wit and a certain wild talent. What makes this show—and the equally strong Top Chef, from the same producers—so addicting is that reality-show backstabbing can only get contestants so far. In the end, it's a meritocracy: What they put on the runway (or, in Top Chef's case, on the plate) is what really matters…
Claude Miller's Class Trip (Picture This) won a Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival eight years ago, but somehow slipped through the cracks and never made it into theaters. Now released on DVD with a sp-sp-spooky cover that seems grossly misleading, the film combines suspense and psychodrama in dealing with an child's murderous visions and their real-life resonance…
A documentary portrait of the gifted, mysterious father of the alt-country movement, Gram Parsons: Fallen Angel (Rhino) covers his stints as a key member of The Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers as well as his influential solo work and his mentorship of Emmylou Harris. Parsons was hard-living but notoriously temperamental, and his misbehavior eventually alienated everyone, including a road manager who stole and burned his corpse.